I recently saw the “Zurbarán: Jacob and His Twelve Sons, Paintings from Auckland Castle” exhibit at the Meadows Museum at SMU in Dallas. Francisco de Zurbarán, 1598-1664, was a Spanish painter. In a room covering the context of the painting, I read:

The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and the “New World”

Jacob’s twelve sons were the founders of the original twelve Hebrew tribes. The tribes of Judah and Benjamin remained in Canaan, while the remaining ten tribes were believed to have been lost following the conquest of the Assyrians in 721 BC. Hope for their recovery persisted and became associated with the return of the Messiah in Jewish and Christian theology. When the Spanish missionary Bartholome de las Casas visited the so-called New World in the mid 16th C, he claimed that the indigenous people he found there were in fact the ten lost Tribes of Israel.A century later, the idea gained further traction thanks in part to Jewish scholars like Manassach ben Israel who defended and popularized the identification of the ten lost Tribes of Israel with the native peoples of the Americas in one of his best-known texts; Hope of Israel, published in 1650. He believed that the discovery of the lost tribes was evidence that they had at last reached all parts of the world, thus signaling the coming of the Messiah to lead the Jews to the Holy Land. The identification of Native Americans as the lost Tribes of Israel, therefore, was theologically important to Jews and Christians alike during the central decades of the 17th century. This may explain why Zurbarin dedicated such a major commission to Jacob and his twelve sons, perhaps with a client in Spain’s American colonies in mind.

I’m far from the first to write this, but the concept of the lost tribes in the Book of Mormon is not original.